1.29.2008

Wow, it's been a while since I last checked in here! Not having eaten in nearly eleven months, I am sooo hungry. But at least I look fantastic, right?

Kidding aside, I've had a series of rather calamitous events--one of which resulted in the loss of all my photos and data on my hard drive. In the meanwhile, I've had an interesting food year, starting with meeting various people and sampling various things at Eat!Vancouver, as the food fair's name so admonishes. If I could eat Vancouver, I reckon the city would taste like wet pavement, with the texture of fresh salmon smoked with some car exhaust. I also had some rather unsuccessful attempts at making latte art, ate rare bison for the first time, cheered when Hung won Top Chef, mourned the loss of Eco Il Pane, resolved to buy only free-range eggs, and made a decent Christmas dinner for eight.

The latter task involved brining a 15-pound turkey for one and a half days (though next time we are aiming for 2 days' time), served with roasted chestnut stuffing, real gravy (made from the turkey giblets), an orange and cranberry sauce, ratatouille* (Thomas Keller's recipe from the Pixar movie), beef bourguignon, and a potato and onion dish. Quick cheese twists made with store-bought puff pastry and the simple desert of wine-poached pears start and finished the meal. Unfortunately this was all undocumented, so you'll have to take my word that the dishes were mostly colorful and the turkey juicy with frequent basting.

Well, I've got a bunch of other things I've been waiting a while to say here so I hope to be back and posting regularly again.

*Our first attempt at the ratatouille dish yielded a surfeit of vegetables--we could have easily filled two large casserole dishes--and we found better results when eschewing a mandoline during prepping.